What Durbin REALLY said...

I'm fed up with the claims from the left that Durbin "just read an FBI memo" or that he was simply drawing attention to a gross injustice being heaped upon innocent muslims who are being unfairly detained by the US military.

Here is the Senate record from Tuesday, June 14 2005.

Here are some excerpts, with my comments interjected:

• This Administration’s detention and interrogation policies are placing our troops at risk and making it harder to combat terrorism.

So, our troops would be safer if we released the prisoners being held at Gitmo back into the jihadi population?

How many German POWs did we release before Hitler's Army was crushed?

• Polls show that Muslims have positive attitudes toward the American people and our values. However, overall, favorable ratings toward the United States and its Government are very low. This is driven largely by the negative attitudes toward the policies of this administration.

So the Iraqis don't like us because we ended the terror reign of Saddam Hussein?
Have US Marines fed a single person into a paper shredder? Thrown one off of a roof top?

• Muslims respect our values, but we must convince them that our actions reflect these values.

This meaningless statement serves no purpose, other than to illustrate that people like Dick Durbin believe the terms 'values' and 'actions' can be separated. But, didn't we hear from John Kerry, the faithful Catholic, during the last campaign that values without action are useless?

Therefore, if muslims respect our values, as Dick says they do, that directly implies that muslims respect our actions. It simply cannot be one or the other.

Senator Dick goes on to describe his solutions to our terrible 'image crisis' around the world (i.e. France, Germany, Iran, at the United Nations, North Korea, al Jazeera...)

• We still would have the ability to hold detainees and to interrogate them aggressively. Members of al-Qaida would not be prisoners of war.
• We would be able to do everything we need to do to keep our country safe.
  
• The President could declare the United States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism.
  
• He could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstances, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Instead of comparing rap music and panties on the head to Auschwitz and Soviet death marches, perhaps Senator Dick should stick to explaining himself and the simultaneous achievement of the aforementioned 4 strategies.

Tell us: how can we keep our country safe while interrogating aggressively people who are not prisoners of war, while obeying the Geneva Convention and giving detainees access to our overloaded federal court system?

The truth is that Senator Dick and the rest of the far left don't want the United States to prevent al-Qaeda from attacking America, because the far left thinks that America deserves to be punished for our standing atop the civilized world.

Osama bin Laden has himself explained that it is American weakness that fuels his forces, such as when he calls us paper tigers for running away from Mogadishu and Beirut. The time to run from these throat cutters has run out. We have no choice but to confront them head on, and to take decisive action in order to demonstrate to the world that American justice is swift, thorough, and severe.